Annotation

Discourses and Identities in Contexts of Educational Change

Publisher Description

Discourses and Identities in Contexts of Educational Change presents the work of fourteen scholars concerning the United States and Mexico. The authors explore current and changing educational contexts through the relationship between discourses and identities. These are contexts in which the participants must negotiate multiple, and sometimes conflicting, positions. The empirical studies reported here are grounded in contemporary theories of sociolinguistics and literacy practices, social relations conceptualized in dynamics of power, and identity representations. The book uniquely contributes to the challenges facing different educational communities in specific contexts by using discourse and identity as the conceptual tools to analyze the problematic and often unclear relationship among diverse educational actors immersed in contexts of change at the local, national, and global levels.

Review The chapters in this book collectively address an interesting range of educational change proposals and implementations, from global to local levels, and with varying points of impact within the overall educational enterprise [...]. Across this span we are presented with diverse and interesting perspectives on, and insights into, ways in which social orderliness and hierarchy are constituted and refined within everyday processes of people being recognized as being particular kinds of persons within particular contexts [...].This book could be read in many ways. My way reads it as a text that moves between forms of social research that speaks to questions of meaning, action, and social order, on the one hand, and forms of educational inquiry undertaken with a view to contributing toward promoting better quality learning and more equitable academic achievement, on the other. In the final analysis, the book prompts difficult questions about the relationship between how formal learning is socially ordered and the ideal of enhancing learning on an equitable basis [... ] (It) is a timely reminder that in the game of educational change the odds are stacked heavily in favour of established order, structure, and hierarchy (Colin Lankshear, from the Introduction)

Author Biography

Guadalupe Lopez-Bonilla is a professor of literacy studies and discourse analysis at the Universidad Autonoma of Baja California. Her research interests include high school students' literacy practices, inequality in education, and youths' identities. She is coauthor (with Alma Carrasco and Alicia Peredo) of La lectura desde el curriculo de educacion basica y media superior en Mexico (2008) (Reading in Language Arts in the Mexican National K-12 Curriculum). Karen Englander is a professor in the Faculty of Languages at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California in Ensenada, Mexico. She brings 25 years of teaching experience in English as a second/foreign language in Canada, California, and Mexico, to her research in academic literacy and disciplinary writing. She is co-author (with David Hanauer) of the forthcoming Scientific Writing in a Second Language.

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